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Carl Lejuez

Carl W. Lejuez began his tenure as dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at KU on Feb. 1, 2016. Most recently, Lejuez was professor of psychology and associate dean of research for the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland.

Lejuez was chosen as dean after a national search to succeed Danny Anderson.

Lejuez joined the University of Maryland in 2001 after he completed a one-year appointment as assistant research professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Brown University. He was an associate dean at Maryland since 2013, leading the research mission in a college with more than 200 faculty members and an overall budget of roughly $100 million. In that role he developed a strategic plan for faculty research and implemented a $300,000 per year seed grant program, leading Maryland’s rise to No. 2 among U.S. universities in federal funding for social sciences research. In addition to stimulating faculty research, he has been extremely active in encouraging undergraduate and graduate student research, including the pursuit of fellowships and other grants. These efforts supported a tripling of NSF graduate research fellowships awarded to the college since he took the post as associate dean.

At Maryland, Lejuez was founder and director of the Center for Addictions, Personality and Emotion Research. He also served as the administrative director at the Maryland Neuroimaging Center. From 2009 to 2015, he was a director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse Pre-Doctoral Institutional Training Program, which is at the intersection of basic neuroscience and addiction treatment development. He has served as an adjunct faculty member at the Yale Child Study Center, New Haven, Conn., and the REAP Program of the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center in Charleston, S.C.

Lejuez’s research interests cover addictions, personality disorders and mood disorders, with the goal of using findings from laboratory based studies in the development of novel assessment and treatment strategies. He has applied his treatment strategies in low-income communities in Washington, D.C., and around the world, including Iraqi Kurdistan, China and several countries in South America. He is a prolific author across multiple fields, including psychology, psychiatry and public health. Other researchers have cited his work more than 8,000 times in the past five years. He was founding editor of the publication Personality Disorders: Theory, Research and Treatment, and serves on editorial boards for Bulletin of Menninger Clinic, Clinical Psychology Review and more. He has received substantial research funding from a number of agencies, including the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Mental Health, both of the National Institutes of Health.

Lejuez has received several early career research awards including two from the American Psychological Association, in Division 3 for experimental psychology (applied) and Division 50 for addictions. Maryland’s College of Behavioral and Social Sciences honored him in 2006 with its Undergraduate and Graduate Teaching and Mentorship Award.

Lejuez earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Emory University. He earned his master’s degree and doctorate in clinical psychology from West Virginia University in 1997 and 2000, respectively, and he completed his clinical internship at the Brown University Clinical Training Consortium.